The webinar entitled ‘Give interculturality a chance – Can social media make a difference?’ on June 29th was to help us understand what social media are and in what ways they can help us improve our understanding of intercultural issues in language learning. I was honoured to be invited by the Language Learning and Social Media – Six key dialogues European project to contribute but unfortunately I was away on the proposed date so I prepared my presentation in advance which is embedded below.
My starting point was:
Why do we mention intercultural competence and social media in the same breath? Because of the way in which social media allows us to connect with orders of magnitude more people than would be possible in ordinary life lived at the local level. So in theory this is a chance to meet people from other cultures, either by accident or design. But is this really meeting people and if so are we meeting them in our culture, their culture or in a third place, as Kramsch talked about, and which in this case is online?
And my conclusion is:
There is intercultural learning to be done using the social media but that it is more of a culture general rather than a culture specific type of learning because it is arguable whether the social media represent any existing culture. I think that they represent a third place, that we have to learn the rules and that there are several different social media cultures.
Also included were Robert O’Dowd at the University of Léon in Spain and Wang Liang of the Open University. O’Dowd described the ways in which the multimedia aspects of social media such as Ning can lead to genuine intercultural encounters between his Spanish students and their American partners while Liang talked about the way in which Chinese students use digital media. The webinar was moderated by Prof. Fred Dervin and Prof Christine Develotte.
You can see the whole webinar from this link and if you were there and had some questions or if you have questions now about my contribution then you are welcome to add them as a comment below.
PS. I no longer work at DEN Viden Djurs!